Richard Goscicki's Blog Posts Tagged 'atheism' (25)

The Garin Hoover Radio Show is on line. It was recorded March 12 and featured a Jew (Manny), a Christian (Rev Terry Jones), an imam and an atheist (moi). The discussion was centered around the question, "Is Islam a Religion of Peace?"

The debate was often heated and vituperative. Rev Jones, I thought, was very good with an all-American cowboy mentality. He told the imam, "we don't want your Sharia Law, so don't even try to bring it here." He made national news last year by trying…

Joan, thanks from your encouragement on Pot Stories. I'm writing a little summery of each piece and I'm really having fun just going over this stuff. There're 27 separate pieces, each with its own information and lessons to be learned. And the diversity of history and thought. All for three bucks.

True story: I was in a Manhattan Blarney Stone bar drinking fifty-cent beers. It was the mid-'80s. I got involved in conversation with a reporter for the New York Post, which…

Many church or mosque goers believe religion gives their lives “meaning.” It’s a delusion, an appealing but false concept. What meaning could being credulous enough to believe the preposterous give one’s life? If anything, I think a good and magnanimous god would disdain such behavior. They’re abandoning reason for self-interest and wishful thinking.

In biology, the Prime Directive (PD) governs all life down to insects, worms and beyond. The force that governs all life is…

The Hoover Radio Show went fine but only as an icebreaker to more important issues. It reminded me of early Christian bishops arguing over how many angels can reside on the head of a pin. I felt like standing up and yelling out, “Look, as you sit here in this luxurious setting, people are getting their heads chopped off, wars are being fought, 15 million people (mostly children) are starving to death and billions have to live in fear of opening their mouth or saying the wrong thing. Isn’t…

Here's my latest eBook, kinky and fun as ever. Plus it brings our a serious national problem that we all should be concerned about. As always a five-dollar purchase will help me continue buying ads on Atheist/Nexus to support our important website—to go along with…

OK, I'll admit it; I was down about the apathy and indifference that greeted my Pot Stories. It was my magnum opus after a life of inescapable unconventionality. Viet Nam, NYU, the ‘60s, New York City and a smorgasbord of pot and hash, pretty much blocked the straight and narrow path. Studying social psych with Phil Zimbardo made it improbable I would allow myself to be drafted in 1966 when I graduated, just before the Tet Offensive. In my opinion, every new Army recruit…

Barbara gave me this list last year and said I could with it as I wish. It’s copyrighted in the epilogue of Mirror Reversal, but I decided to share it with A/N friends and readers. I love it because it’s so conspicuously “whacky and bizarre” that you can hit your religious antagonists in the head with their own beliefs. After reading this list, the only rational conclusion, (I feel anyway) is that the…

When I wrote Mirror Reversal in 2007, Global Warming was still uncertain and actively debated. Now massive destruction and human depopulation is as certain as the sinking of the Titanic once the fifth lower compartment was breached by the razor-sharp spikes of the iceberg. As the head engineer said, “It’s a mathematical certainly.”

My son, Rickie, a long-distance trailer driver recently told me that when he spends a night at a gigantic truck stop in the Texas, there’re…

Preface: I’m not gay, but if I were I’d be pissed at some bronze-age fisherman or goat-herder declaring my genetic sexual proclivities to be “Abomination”—to be loathed or deplored. I have news for you, I’d say, the whole screwy religion has caused more misery and suffering than same-sex lovemaking ever could. At least nobody gets hurt when safely and consensually performed. It’s time we turn the tables…

When we study science, in particular evolutionary biology, it becomes pretty evident that humans were the result of purposeless and random forces of nature. We are not what natural selection had in mind because there is no mind.

So instead of attributing our existence to some patriarchal god, let’s take it for what it is: It just is. Like the old song says, “Let’s live and laugh at it all.”

You can lead a hog to a pigsty but you can’t make him stink. (From the…

A good example of how religion distorts and perverts the worldview is the treatment of racism.

The Bible doesn’t say much about racism but, just as with slavery, the belief or doctrine that certain races are inferior to others is rampant and pervasive throughout history. Just look at racism in America before MLK and the civil rights movement. As wrong, unfair, and illogical as it is, the Holy Scriptures have done little to encourage and exhort followers to… Continue

The Bible and Koran encourage and condone the worst aspects of human behavior: war, slavery, necrophilia, cruelty to animals, anthropocentrism, suicide, starvation, racism, xenophobia, blind faith, sexism, homophobia, nepotism, denial of reality, self flagellation, dichotomous thinking, torture, human sacrifice, symbolic cannibalism, and other insults to reason. The result has been to distort and pervert the worldview of all who cherish these religious beliefs and have faith in the dictates…

This is a follow-up to my previous post on church marquee epigrams. Richard Dawkins recently initiated an anti-religious banner on a London bus, but the material was pabulum. Something like, “There might not be a God so enjoy life.”

Utterly milquetoast. Read some of the epigrams on the list that the churches post. They’re downright… Continue

This video fascinates me. No laughing; this is serious stuff because it influences so many people. I keep asking myself, "how can this be reality?". The same answer inevitably pops into my cluttered brain like one of those mole games in the Playland that you hit on the head with a mallet: “chaos theory and Murphy’s Law are the only drivers of reality, stupid. That's how.”

Organized religion is incorrect and inappropriate. The doctrines, beliefs, and liturgies of Catholicism, Islam and Judaism should be classified with other mythologies.

It is the Earth and the natural environment that is sacred and deserves our love and respect—not plastic figurines of Christ, Moses or the Holy Prophet (may anxiety be with him for screwing up so many heads.)

Biodiversity must be preserved. The dwindling wildlife and deplorable extinctions at human hands are… Continue

What is it about organized religion that irks me so? It’s like being on the Titanic as they headed for the iceberg. “Hey, you dopes, we’re headed for disaster. What the heck are you saying prayers for? Turn this oversized ego trip. You can still avoid hitting it.”

For centuries the Church has done the most sick, most demonic and most cruel work, via the Inquisition, to suppress Species Consciousness. The popes seemed to know that if people learned how we got here, their life of pomp,… Continue

Did you ever stop to think what life would be like if Christian thought never happened? In the twenty-first century we should be living in an earthly paradise. Species consciousness would have given it to us.

The fact is Christian thought crippled and stultified the progress of consciousness. We have species consciousness for only 150 years since the publication of Origin of Species—and even then the Church tried to render Darwin’s ideas ineffectual and worthless. The… Continue

Consider what Pope Benedict’s organization did to freethinkers and scientists during the days of the witch hunts and human sacrifices. The Catholic Church murdered and tortured thousands of deep thinkers and thereby stultified and fossilized human thought and curiosity. Humans should have evolved into a spiritual entity by now.

Left to me, I would do to him what the church did to Galileo. I would place him under house arrest in one of his many mansions—the church loves real estate.… Continue